The math on a Colorado moose license is not subtle. Roughly 66,000 hunters put in for the 2026 draw, and 761 licenses were issued — 438 for cow moose and 323 for bulls, per reporting on the season’s draw results. Winners found out at the end of May, and the muzzleloader and archery seasons open September 12, followed by rifle on October 1.
The bull side of that pool is even tighter than the statewide 87-to-1 headline suggests: bulls make up 323 of the 761 licenses. Cow-versus-bull split matters for hunters because those are separate hunt codes with separate draw math. In practical terms, most of this year’s applicants will not carry a Colorado moose tag this decade.
Colorado is not alone in running long odds through the mail. Alaska, which has no preference-point system, runs pure lotteries; a single Farewell-area hunt (DM682) issued six permits from 24 applications last cycle for a 25% draw rate, an outlier at the top of a distribution where dozens of hunts sit below 5%, according to a publicly maintained draw-odds table built from ADF&G data. Maine’s fixed-supply system issued 3,705 moose permits through its 2026 lottery, per the state’s moose regulation page — a much larger tag pool than Colorado’s.
What is unusual about Colorado is the geometry. The state distributes fewer than a thousand tags across a large mountain footprint of huntable moose habitat, with permits split between cow and bull, and the annual applicant count keeps rising while permit supply grows only in small increments. That is the shape of a draw that produces both a September opening day for a lucky several hundred and a spreadsheet full of unsuccessful hunters for whom next year’s application is already the plan.
